Websites visitors behave differently. One may bounce straight away, while others click on links. Others read and convert, when the rest just leave the tab open, or do nothing.
Understanding users' behavior can be difficult, especially when a website has a call-to-action that needs to be engaged with. Google has its own tools at its disposal, available for free. But for WordPress websites, they have what Google calls 'Site Kit'.
This official WordPress plugin from Google allows webmasters and web owners to understand how people find and use their site, using data straight from Google.
"Site Kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free," said Google, on the Site Kit plugin's WordPress page.
Using the plugin, webmasters and web owners can set up and Google's services easily, and get all the insights in one place on their WordPress dashboards.
Site Kit shows key metrics and insights from different Google products, allowing webmasters and web owners to see:
- Search Console: Understand how Google Search discovers and displays their pages in Google Search.
- Analytics: Giving information about how visitors navigate the website, and track goals they have set up for users to complete.
- AdSense: Keep track of how much their site is earning from Google AdSense.
- PageSpeed Insights: Shows performance analysis of the site, in comparison to others, with actionable tips from PageSpeed Insights.
- Tag Manager: Allowing them to easily set up Tag Manager without any code editing, to then manage them in Tag Manager.
- Optimize: Allows them to to set up Optimize with no code editing required, to then set up set up A/B tests in Optimize.
According to Google on its Site Kit page:
Site Kit aggregates insights from the above Google products, "distilled in a dashboard that your clients or other teams can easily access." This in turn will give them a high-level view of significant changes and how users are finding/interacting with their site.
With the ability to see the most important metrics Google can provide, directly inside WordPress, Site Kit should give WordPress users an out-of-the-box dashboard experience without the headache of pulling data from separate sources.
Because Site Kit is essentially a plugin, webmasters and web owners aren't required to do any source code editing. They can also assign roles and grant individual permissions.
And best of all, because the plugin is an official product of Google for WordPress, users can get the latest best practices recommended by the above Google products.
Site Kit by Google is released after Google first released it in developer preview earlier this 2019. Google said that thousands of developers have installed it.
For those who are interested in this plugin, the source code for Site Kit is open source.